Posts Tagged ‘bacon’

I don’t know if you read this blog for the witty turns-of-phrase (yes, I flatter myself), for the insightful links from the research department, because you have nothing better to do, or because you keep thinking that sooner or later I’ll lose some more weight.

If that last reason is your reason, I have good news and bad news for you tonight: No, I haven’t lost weight since the last time I posted a weigh-in. I was 262 this morning, which isn’t bad considering how much I stretched my “program” since I was last posting regularly in March, but it’s not the same thing as losing weight. The good news is that now I’m pissed-off about it. Which isn’t a good motivator for everyone, but for me, it’s always been a fine way to keep my mind on the project at-hand. Being angry about something sharpens my focus.

Why am I pissed-off? Well, there are the obvious reasons – primarily that I’ve been stalled within a few pounds for too long, and since I actually write about his stuff on the internet it’s kind of embarrassing to be stalled for so long for no other reason than that I haven’t been on-task. I wanted to be farther along than this before summer, and I’m not, and it’s nobody’s fault but my own.

But that’s not all. The truth is – and we all know this – that there are a lot of too-good-to-be-true weight-loss gimmicks out there, and if people like me who are doing this sensibly don’t succeed, and don’t share that success, the gimmicks win. And then everybody loses, because the gimmicks don’t work. At least not in the long run.

So I won’t have it. No white-bread hamburger bun, no bowl of cheese-grits, no Kraft Mac and Cheese tastes good enough for me to let the gimmicks win without a fight.

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Speaking of hamburger buns, here’s a bonus bacon cheeseburger link and a couple of thoughts. You may have read that McDonald’s announced they will phase out using pigs from gestation-crates for their pork products. Good news, right? Yeah, turns out they’re not going to actually, ummm, do that for about ten years. One more reason to stay away from fast food.

Beyond that, let’s talk about bacon cheeseburgers for a minute. A while back, in one of my more lucid moments in this process, it occurred to me that when I order a bacon cheeseburger – or any sort of beef burger – what I taste is the burger. Furthermore, that’s what I want to taste when I order a burger – the beef. So I tried really thinking and tasting my burger (yeah, eating intentionally) to see how much the bacon was adding to the experience. Answer? Almost nothing. And on further review, I think I’m going to jettison the cheese. A good burger stands on its own. No reason to tart up a good piece of beef. It’s insulting to both the cow and the pig.

Yeah, I still eat bacon, you bet I do. But I save it for places where it really makes a difference – carbonara, next to an egg, places where it belongs. It doesn’t belong on a burger. So I don’t put it there anymore. And I don’t miss it.

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I’ve had a fair bit of experience with hospitals lately (some joyous, some less-so) and as a result was reminded that hospital food is, in a word, bad. Bad for your taste buds, bad for your body.

The food patients are served tastes bad and so does the cafeteria food. If it just tasted bad, I suppose I could forgive it – after all, they’re running hospitals, not resorts. But I cannot forgive the simple truth that they serve food that just isn’t good for humans. Biscuits and gravy? Sausage patties? Copious amounts of bacon? Beef stew with white rice? White bread? Really?

Case in point: The morning after my newest daughter was born I went down to the cafeteria, certain they would at least have some nice whole-grain cereal I could nosh, if not my beloved frozen blueberries. No luck. The best I could find was a variety of raisin bran sweetened with, you guessed it, high-fructose corn syrup. No thanks. I ended up with some of the nastiest scrambled eggs I’ve eaten in a looong time. And some bacon. There were probably forty options I could have picked, but the tasteless eggs were about the only healthy option.

And if you’re on some sort of calorie-restricted diet, God help you, because that just means they’re going to serve you fake food. Fake sugar, fake “light” mayo, etc. Things that everyday observation is proving are simply not good for you to eat.

You know, hospitals don’t want to be called “hospitals” anymore. They want to be “health-care systems” and that sort of thing. But what kind of “health care” is it to feed you things that will, if you eat enough of them, make you sick? It makes me wonder why they present this sort of thing. I want to give them the benefit of the doubt and say it’s purely a cost-saving issue: They contract with food service companies for the cheapest possible fare, and this is what that is.

My fear, however, is that it is a financial issue, but not one of savings, rather one of earnings: If the “health-care” company is more concerned about its own fiscal wellness than the physical wellness of its patients, it might be tempted to look the other way when somebody says, “Shouldn’t we offer fresh fruit instead of biscuits and gravy with a side of aspartame?”

Here’s what I’m doing about it: I’m going to start talking about it to every physician I know. I encourage you to do the same. It’s way past time to just accept that hospital food is bad for you.